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Politics

The Presidency

Professor Russell Riley, co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program, is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on elite oral history interviewing and the contemporary presidency. He has logged more than 1,500 hours of confidential interviews with senior members of the White House staff, cabinet officers, and foreign leaders back to the days of the Carter and Reagan Administrations. Since 2003, he has led both the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project and the George W. Bush Oral History Project. He has lectured extensively on American politics and oral history methods across the United States, as well as in China, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and by videoconference (for the US Department of State) at Al Quds and Najah Universities in the West Bank.

In 2003, Riley led the Center’s biographical oral history of Washington lawyer Lloyd N. Cutler. He organized and directed, also in 2003, a symposium of former leaders of the White House Congressional Affairs operation, and he helped to organize and carry out, in 2008, a symposium of former White House speechwriters, which was nationally televised on C-SPAN.

Riley graduated from Auburn University in 1983, where he received the Charles P. Anson Award as outstanding student of economics. He subsequently studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and then received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was a research assistant to James Sterling Young at the Miller Center. He subsequently taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown. He helped found Penn’s Washington Semester Program and from 1994 to 1998 was its resident director and a lecturer in American politics. From 1998 to 2000, he was a program director with the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in Austria, where he organized week-long sessions on topics ranging from racial politics to the evolution of transatlantic relations in the post-Cold War world. He returned to the Miller Center in January 2001.

Russell Riley (Co-Editor)

Russell Riley (Editor)

Russell Riley News Feed

Though he ended up seeking congressional approval for the Gulf War, Bush was unconvinced he needed it—saying he would have gone regardless of the vote. Miller Center scholar Russell Riley, head of the Presidential Oral History Program, agrees that “there is a very long history of military interventions abroad—everything from Barbary pirates to the desert helicopter mission to get hostages out of Iran—in which presidents have freely exercised their powers without any sort of authorization from Congress.”

Such attacks by a party’s main political arm are nothing new. But from a sitting president? “The closest I can come is FDR and the ‘Southern purge’ in 1938,” said Riley Russell, also of UVA. “I don’t recall anything similar … on presidents since Jimmy Carter.”

Russell Riley, co-chairman of the Miller Center's Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia, said that passing legislation to protect special counsels would be a "sharp stick in the eye of the president" and that he's not surprised Republicans aren't taking that step against Trump. "What they're trying to do is erect, by their language, some guardrails against the president taking this step," Riley said.

Russell Riley, a professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, described Wood as a victim of a highly charged political era, somewhat like our current climate. “The Republicans were eager to find any vulnerabilities in Clinton nominees in 1993,” said Riley. “Sensitivities were heightened because Clinton was billing himself as a new kind of Democrat with a new way of doing business, running against twelve years of Republican rule.” Riled added: “When there were any foibles found in a nominee, they were a very rich target.”

“Most presidents, when they come into office, have a much more nuanced and complicated notion of loyalty than this idea of protecting the president and simply saluting and saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ and, ‘No, sir.’ And some of it may very well be rooted in the excesses of Nixon, because that highlighted the consequences of that sort of value-free embrace of loyalty,” Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, told me.